Increase Patient Health—and the Health of Your Practice—by Ensuring Patients Regularly Schedule Their Appointments

“Chronic diseases are driven by risk factors, many of which can be prevented. Preventive care has the potential to control risk factors, thereby reducing the prevalence of costly chronic conditions. Many preventive clinical care services offer good value for increasingly scarce dollars,” notes research from the Robert Wood Johnson foundation.

Proactively reaching out to patients to schedule preventative care appointments helps them stay healthy and, for those with chronic conditions, on track with maintenance. Patient outreach for preventative care also benefits healthcare providers clinically and financially.

Encourage Preventative Care While Plugging Schedule Holes

Innovative outreach strategies can take the burden off busy employees. Automated patient communication solutions help practices plug holes in their schedules while simultaneously keeping patients on track for scheduling their preventative care appointments.

Not only does this enhance productivity and profits, it allows providers to stay on top of health challenges before they become more serious. With diabetes alone now affecting nearly ten percent of all Americans, the potential for serious medical complications is a real and growing issue for many people. Ensuring patients with diabetes receive regular care is just one example of the essential nature of preventative care.

Preventative care also decreases potentially higher costs and heavy financial burdens for patients since this type of care typically is covered—sometimes up to 100 percent—by insurance companies.

Build Trust and a Stronger Bottom Line

Letting patients know you care about their health and want to ensure they make necessary appointments has another important benefit. It builds trust with them. A reminder that it’s time to schedule an appointment tells patients they are valued. The relationship is strengthened, and the odds are higher that they will continue scheduling appointments in the future.

Using the communications method that patients respond to best—phone, text and email messages—also increases their feelings of being understood and respected, even as it increases your response rate.

Increase the odds of success for patients and your practice by incorporating automated recall and outreach messages into your regular patient engagement. Not only will you reduce overhead costs and stress on busy staff, you will gain increased revenue to reinvest in better patient outcomes.